snippets of cloud

1. Name-calling

“…use of words to connect a person or idea to a negative concept. The aim is to make a person reject something without examining the evidence because of the negative associations attached to it.”

2. Attractive Generalities

“The opposite of name-calling, this involves the use of highly valued concepts and beliefs which attract general approval and acclaim. These are vague, emotionally attractive words like ‘freedom‘, ‘honor‘ and ‘love‘.”

3. Transfer

“…to carry over the authority and approval of something you respect and revere to something the propagandist would have you accept. One does this by projecting the qualities of an entity, person or symbol to another through visual or mental association.”

4. Testimonial

“…leverage the experience, authority and respect of a person and use it to endorse a product or cause.”

5. Plain Folks

“…propagandist positions him or herself as an average person just like the target audience, thereby demonstrating the ability to empathize and understand the concerns/feelings of the masses.”

6. Card Stacking

“…manipulating audience perceptions by emphasizing one side of an argument which reinforces your position … compare and contrast the best possible scenarios with the worse examples.”

7. Bandwagon

“…to suggest that ’since everyone is doing it, you should too’.”

http://www.doshdosh.com/the-art-of-propaganda-seven-common-techniques/

“Playing four 15-minute sessions of board games such as snakes and ladders can improve a child’s mathematical abilities significantly, according to a study of four and five-year-olds. And the improvement in numerical tests is still measurable nine weeks later.”

http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2267895,00.html

“…the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It’s too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.”

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all

Research suggests that a bias towards higher priced goods may have something to do with the way that the brain links price with pleasure, and leads people to make assumptions about quality. NYT.

Professor Rangel, Caltech, said that there were reasons to suspect that price tag bias occurs in many contexts. Given the human love affair with high priced luxury goods, and their association with status and power, it’s possible that we’ve come to experience a cerebral shiver of delight in response to things that promise cachet.

The Goldilocks Rule. Don’t give people too little or too much.

Give them just the right amount for what you want them to achieve or experience.

Rule of Four. Don’t expect the audience to keep in mind more than four groups on a slide. Car license plates and telephone numbers are as long as they are because of how much information we can easily store in our short-term memories: on average about four groups.
Rudolph-the-Red-Nosed-Reindeer Rule. What’s different stands out, be it a red nose, a large graphic, or words in bold.

Powerpoint for Martians?

Similar to the ‘tappers and listeners’ example quoted in Made to Stick. Research from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests;

You have only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they’ve correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time. And the sender estimates that 80% of the time the recipient will correctly gauge the tone of the message.

In reality, the recipient correctly gauges the tone only 50% of the time.

The difference between the sender and the receiver’s understanding is a very dangerous gap to leave open to chance…

common emoticons

Affection for our own names and initials can lead us to failureOur tendency to like our own names and initials - sometimes referred to as a form of implicit egotism - can have relatively trivial consequences, such that Britney will be more likely to move to Brighton than Sheffield, and Jack more likely to buy a Jaguar than a Ferrari. But now, in a series of intriguing studies, Leif Nelson and Joseph Simmons have shown how, from baseball performance to Law School, our affection for our own names can have bizarrely detrimental consequences.

…students with the initials C or D achieved significantly lower grades than students whose initials were unrelated to grade scores, and students with the initials A or B.

http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2008/01/affection-for-our-own-names-and.html

The brain stutters or boggles at the sight or sound of taboo words, taking more processing and interfering with the normal thought train.

“The psychologist Don MacKay has done the experiment and found that people are indeed slowed down by an involuntary boggle as soon as the eyes alight on each word. The upshot is that a speaker or writer can use a taboo word to evoke an emotional response in an audience quite against their wishes. Thanks to the automatic nature of speech perception, an expletive kidnaps our attention and forces us to consider its unpleasant connotations. That makes all of us vulnerable to a mental assault whenever we are in earshot of other speakers, as if we were strapped to a chair and could be given a punch or a shock at any time.”

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=246c0071-a9cd-46e2-a665-c6e61a45377e

“In humans, the amygdala “lights up”–it shows greater metabolic activity in brain scans–when the person sees an angry face or an unpleasant word, especially a taboo word.

The response is not only emotional but involuntary. Once a word is seen or heard, we reflexively look it up in memory and respond to its meaning, including its connotation. The classic demonstration is the Stroop effect, found in every introductory psychology textbook and the topic of more than four thousand scientific papers. People are asked to look through a list of letter strings and to say aloud the color of the ink in which each one is printed.

The reason is that, among literate adults, reading a word is such an over-learned skill that it has become mandatory: You can’t will the process “off,” even when you don’t want to read the words but only pay attention to the ink. A similar thing happens with spoken words as well.”

http://www.apa.org/science/stroop.html

Avert Your Eyes
Distraction is key. “That’s the game: getting people to focus attention in the wrong place, though you’re doing it in front of their eyes,” says Dan Simons, a visual cognition and perception expert at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Attention is like a spotlight: We notice only what it’s focused on.

Follow the Leader
Because people instinctively look where other people are looking, the magician gazes where he wants you to look, and your eyes follow.

Too Much Information
A steady stream of verbal patter also provides camouflage. People have limited attention: Fill it with fast talk, and they’re less likely to notice other details.

But I Saw It!
People have a tendency to see what they expect to see. “The magician pretends to throw a ball up in the air. People perceive the ball moving up, even though it never left his hand,” explains Gustav Kuhn, a magician and research psychologist at the University of Durham in England. The harder you look, the less likely you are to spot the sleight.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/rss/pto-20060925-000002.html

“The idea that creativity is vital to success is not widely accepted, yet it is built on a simple and wonderful truth, that all people have the capacity to be creative. Sir Kenneth suggests that when people are encouraged to be creative, they often find out what they are really good at, and it is when people find out what they are good at that they become better at everything they try. He identifies this as being something to do with “extreme confidence” entering the equation.”

http://pages.citebite.com/r6n1c2ydwdy

Rewards create emotions, emotions drive decisions

“We’re all gut players?
For a lot of our decisions we are. It actually turns out our unconscious processes are a lot more powerful than we thought. In fact, they’re probably better at making decisions than our conscious access. Our conscious awareness and attention is really limited in the amount it can process.

Why are emotions so important (in marketing)?
Emotions turn out to be the way in which the brain encodes things of value. When an economist talks about how much utility a decision has for somebody or how much reward somebody is likely to get — that is actually being encoded in the brain in emotions. … “

http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2007/11/interview-quartz.html

LOCK
Lead - strong plots need a compelling lead character
Objective - the lead needs a driving objective
Confrontation - opposition brings a story to life
Knock-out - a great ending, an ending has more impact on people than any other part of the story

The 3 Act structure, created through a disturbance and 2 doors. A disturbance to ‘normality’ in Act 1, then create a ‘putting it on the line’ choice gate in to Act 2, and another ‘no return’ gate in to Act 3.

“Drama is life with the dull bits left out” - Alfred Hitchcock

We perceive a ’streak’ as having occurred is after just three repeats – the ‘run of three’. We don’t read meaning into a repeat of two, and we don’t read any additional meaning into streaks of more than three.

In sports gambling, a team that has won three games in a row will be overpriced by the bookies (because most punters will have acted as though the team has an increased chance of winning), while a team that has lost three in a row will be under-priced. “A savvy gambler (who is aware of the run of three) might do well to bet against teams that have won three games in a row and bet for teams that have lost three games in a row,”

Dice rolling is much more than a way to create random numbers. There is much more invested in the simple action of rolling dice than resolving something. The way that you throw, the way that you rattle, the desire to see the dice roll or drop or spin, the way that you kiss your hand, or blow on the dice, the way you flick your hand after you have thrown the bones. There must be something in the movement to influence the throw.

Projection of patterns and influence in to dice rolling or random events

Reading patterns where none exist…
Zurich Axioms “Chaos is not dangerous until it begins to look orderly”
(http://www.zurichaxioms.com/vonpatterns.html)

“Within a few weeks’ of the Shuffle’s release, the serendipity effect had kicked in. “OMG! That was the perfect song for this!” “Seriously. It can’t be random. It’s putting songs together that just… work*” The Shuffle was getting people out of their playlist ruts. Out of the music comfort zones we all fall into (emo, anyone?). Exposing them to songs they’d loaded onto their pre-Shuffle iPod but that never seemed to be one of The Chosen Ones. Think about it. Think about all the music on your (non-Shuffle) iPod, computer, or vintage CD rack. Now think about the subset you actually listen to regularly. For most of us, it’s a pathetically small set. By literally forcing people to listen to randomly-chosen songs, the Shuffle was constantly delighting, surprising, rewarding, stretching users. And users loved it.
(http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/01/add_a_little_mo.htm)

You can easily tell the difference between large things in the distance and small things near to you, by the detail in the image. Near distance things have more granularity and detail, far distance things are less clear with sketchy details.

Imagination works in exactly the same way as your eyesight, when it comes to forecasting or predicting things. The nearer in time, the more detail. The farther in to the future, the less detail and more sketchy the outline becomes.

This has a massive impact on our ability to plan projects or make forecasts about the future. With anything requiring us to imagine a reasonable period of time, we are generally only able to predict the broad, rough details and not able to get to the detail. This is also true of the past, with our ability to remember the broad details, the salient points that fit the schema rather than recall the full details.

Our forecasts (and memories) are also influenced by our current state of mind, or current hot topics. We pay more attention to the current focal points or trends.

(Daniel Gilbert - Stumbling on Happiness)

Trends are created by people copying each other, small numbers of innovators create new things. Some of these things get copied over and over, some/most get ignored.

http://pages.citebite.com/p1i8w2f7d0gsc
http://www.influxinsights.com/blog/article/1357/influx-interview–dr–alex-bentley–random-copying-and-culture.html

gapingvoid.com

Research has shown that human eyes have a big impact on how we behave. Eyes make something real, and make it personal. When something is real and personal, we tend to behave ‘better’ or more honestly.

We appear to accept or imbue non human things, especially TV or computer screens with human characteristics when provided only the slightest humanizing encouragement, and the we respond to them as if they were human.
see ‘Media Equation‘

The addition of a 3rd ‘unpopular’ or non choice to a decision between 2 choices, will bias the outcome towards one of the original 2 choices. The human brain, always seeks simple answers. The 3rd option provides a measure that can be used to compare against the othe choices, often simplifying the choice. (decoy choice effect) Read the rest of this entry »